Keywords: Religious
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
-
AUSTRALIA
- Julian Butler
- 03 June 2022
1 Comment
Bernie Finn is not a figure I would naturally warm to. He has a rambunctious, contrarian persona that grates. A few months ago, if you had said to me that he would be expelled from the Victorian Liberal Party, I would have imagined it would be for some position or action I find egregious. Instead, he has been expelled for a position I essentially share.
READ MORE 
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 June 2022
1 Comment
As I was reading the illuminating contributions to Class in Australia I had to confront my attitudes to Marxist analysis, to the claims of sociology, social work and psychology to be sciences, to the relative importance of inequality based on wealth, gender and race, and to any claim that canonises individual choice while claiming to be value free.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Miles Pattenden
- 26 May 2022
5 Comments
News leaked earlier this month that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn its most famous decision, that in Roe vs Wade (1973) which protects a pregnant woman's freedom to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The decision has attracted much criticism both in the past and now on account of its dubious legal reasoning – in particular, its attempt to link the right to abort to a right to privacy which itself was notional and not specified in the US Constitution.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 24 May 2022
5 Comments
Governments lose elections, but Oppositions still must demonstrate that they are a capable alternative. Both the Morrison Coalition government and the Albanese Labor Opposition played their part last Saturday. There were many sub-plots in the pattern of voting, but this election was primarily lost and won in the four biggest mainland cities.
READ MORE
-
EDUCATION
- Chris Middleton
- 23 May 2022
5 Comments
Perhaps the most dramatic individual result of the Federal election was that Menzies’s seat, Kooyong, has fallen to a Teal independent, Dr Monique Ryan. Xavier College sits in the Kooyong electorate, and Dr Ryan is a parent at the College. Dr Ryan proved to be an impressive candidate who ran as a good a local campaign as I have ever seen. It was marked by a strong engagement by many locals, and especially among professional women, and older residents.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Stephen Minas
- 23 May 2022
2 Comments
‘We removed him from the mausoleum’, wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin’s heirs?’ The poem was published in 1962 but it’s still a good question. Today one of Stalin’s heirs commands a barbaric war against Ukraine with the enthusiastic cheerleading of another such heir – the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate reestablished by Stalin.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Anthony N Castle
- 18 May 2022
5 Comments
I was invited to a party the night of the 2019 election. The night’s entertainment was invite-only, with long tables of bread and wine, and I stepped back from the sounds of celebration to hear the political coverage on my phone. Standing at the far window, I looked up to see people in the night below, out in the dark, silent. Behind me a party guest shouted over the noise ‘what happened?’ I looked away from those outside and answered: a loss.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Julian Butler
- 12 May 2022
2 Comments
Election campaigns can be defined by all sorts of things. Gaffes, negative ads, international incidents, public policy. It is trite but no less true to say that this federal election campaign has been much more about the first three rather than the last. The policy discussion has been edged into the election mix most seriously by various interest groups and by some of the macro party and independent candidates seeking election.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Kerrie Handasyde
- 03 May 2022
4 Comments
Mother’s Day was a religious event, as was the older English tradition of Mothering Sunday in which worshippers returned home to their ‘mother church’. But as this new celebration of Mother’s Day spread around the English-speaking world, it preserved in public and private ritual a particular idea of womanhood. It asserted that true womanhood was motherly.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 May 2022
6 Comments
We should not underestimate the difficulty that people who represent independent branches of the same organization face when drawing up an agreed statement on contentious issues. Even the widely applauded Uluru Statement from the Heart did not secure the support of all Indigenous groups. If the Bishops Statement was to be effective it had to be supported, or at least tolerated, by all members of the Conference, despite their differing views about political and church issues and the priority that should be given to them in advocacy.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 26 April 2022
10 Comments
The Church must speak up to be relevant, but those who seek to ‘speak for the church’ must be brave. They risk exposing themselves to claims of bias unless they stick to a very narrow agenda and speak in extremely measured terms. Yet if they are too bland they risk being irrelevant to the sharp end of political debate and their intervention becomes little more than a symbolic ritual.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 21 April 2022
23 Comments
This year Anzac Day promises to be a subdued celebration with local events in which people who have fought in wars and their relatives can take part. Few will be able to travel to Gallipoli to remember the invasion. The focus of the day will remain rightly on the sorrow of war and not on the heroic achievements of soldiers or on deemed distinctive Australian qualities displayed at Gallipoli. The association of soldiers at Gallipoli with footballers playing their games on Anzac Day will seem not only crass but ridiculous.
READ MORE